Bless La Quadrature du Net who posted this picture in response to the recent decision.

We reported on the Creation and Internet Bill being pushed into law by French legislators. The Creation and Internet Bill was being touted as the "Internet Three Strikes" Bill, and entertainment industry gestapo, like the RIAA were reportedly very happy and excitedly pushing this Bill forward as a victory for Digital Rights Management, copyright protection, and a failure for torrent sites, providers of torrents and other varieties of bootleg material available on Peer to Peer networks. Nevermind that there are legitimate, legal and honest uses for such sharing of files.

Following on the heels of the recent decision by Swedish courts against The Pirate Bay, things were looking pretty glum. Now, no one here, at SPVG is gonna be heard promoting, aggrandizing, or otherwise playing sides with people who illegally share files, so quit gearing up to take us on.

What you will hear us expound upon, sometimes at great length, is what the French government finally got into their heads: The Creation and Internet Bill was found un-Constitutional. WHOOHOOO!! Yay, so, there you have it folks. They tossed it out like yesterdays garbage, and it IS just that, garbage.

Today, the French Constitutional Council has ruled that the law, dubbed the The Creation and Internet bill is unconstitutional and violates the Declaration of 1789. The declaration says that all parties are innocent until proven guilty. The three strikes law would force customers to prove their own innocence.

The Creation and Internet bill, which recently failed passage, has now passed.

Presumably, designed to protect the copyrights and property of French artists, say for instance, the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy - Carla Bruni – who released her third album, 'Comme Si De Rien N'Etait' (translation: As if Nothing Had Happened) in July of '08. I don't really want to pick on the man's wife, I'm sure, though I've no first hand knowledge of this, that she's a nice person, certainly more talented musically than I, and sure as hell knows how to marry to further her own agenda, very smart.

(I believe in stating facts and then letting people make up their own minds, so here they are: The French government gave copies of the album to 14, 000 marketing ambassadors overseas. The French treasury purchased the albums along with wine and cheese vouchers as part of the 1 million pounds campaign to promote Gallic culture overseas - my own government is certainly not free from criticism, but France passed this law.)

Back to the legislation, a new state agency will send warning emails followed by a letter to illegal file sharers. If caught downloading a third time, a user’s internet connection will be severed. Good thing I don't live in France probably, I'd hate to have to defend myself as if I were presumed guilty. How are these "illegal downloads" going to be identified? If the file I download is corrupt, or contains a virus or trojan, is this same government agency going to fly to the defense of the French citizen and track down the naughty person who put it there? How many of this "new state agency" are going to surf the internet while at their state sponsored job and be pinged for illegal downloading, since so much of that happens in the workplace?

Many times, I feel compelled to go back to my tried and true statement, legislation can not keep track of, or even begin to hope to keep up with advances in computer technology. The flavor of the day has been for a long time, "torrents", torrent this, torrent that, and a good number of computer users would probably be hard pressed to tell you what a torrent actually is. Next week, month, year...it won't be a torrent that is under fire from legislators, it will be something else, suitably named a "thingamawhoziewhatsit". If we start breaking up data into slugs (not packets) and when able to be tracked, they're called thingamawhoziewhatsit's, legislation will all have to be rewritten to ban these horrible abuses of technological power called, not torrents, but thingamawhoziewhatsit's.

Thank all the powers that be and anyone else I can think of, that I do NOT reside in France. How, are they going to accomplish this, which, according to the majority of French ISP's is going to cost millions of Euros annually to even begin to enforce? Simple answer, the legislation is going to fail, in gamer parlance, "epically". France Digital Copyright legislation pwned by ignorance, that'll be the new headline, and like the French First Ladies third album, it will be "As If Nothing Had Happened".

Darn France for putting me in the same boat as a Socialist Parliamentarian, namely Patrick Bloche, who said the bill was "dangerous, useless, inefficient, and very risky for us citizens". Oh well, he's right.